Theatre review 1/2023

Description

The first issue of 2023’s Theatre Review opens with Julie Pšenička’s essay “On Machov’s
Scenic Conception of Folk Dance: From the Lachian Dances to the London Bartered Bride.”
Through the London production of Smetana’s Bartered Bride at Sadler’s Wells Opera during
the war years, the present essay reflects on the influences of ethnographic impulses of the
domestic interwar avant-garde, which shaped Machov’s approach to the choreography of this
opera in 1943. Based on the given observations, it attempts to expand the perspective of
Machov’s domestic avant-garde experiences with folk dances with impulses he encountered
in the English environment of 1943–1945, which significantly contributed to the shaping
of his vision of modern Czech ballet in the post-war years. The case study seeks to broaden
the previous knowledge that Vladimír Vašut, the Czech dance historian, published about
Machov’s work in London in the past, and which František Černý and Ota Ritz-Radlinský
briefly mentioned. Research conducted in the collections of London memory institutions
made it possible to identify resources and documents that older researchers did not have
available. Partial resources of an unclear provenance, the existence of which indicated Vašut
in the second half of the 1980s, were identified in domestic collections. Following Machov’s
approach to the choreography of The Bartered Bride, the analysis seeks to deepen earlier
conclusions regarding Machov’s London episode.
The second study in this issue is Michal Topor’s “Robert Saudek in theatrical context.”
Although Robert Saudek (1880 Kolín–1935 London) made his mark in the field of theatre with
more than one work with immediate resonance, he is almost absent from history, neither
in the German nor in the Czech perspective. The aim of the present study is primarily to
reconstruct the theatrical aspect of Saudek’s career; this illumination is not primarily
motivated by a conviction of the aesthetic height of the author’s theatrical work so much as
by the possibilities that open up for a more nuanced understanding of the totality of his career
and its (Central) European context. It traces Saudek’s movement between the experiments
that developed his early dramaturgical considerations to Revoluce na gymnasiu / Eine
Gymnasiasten-Tragodie (Revolution / Tragedy at the Gymnasium), and then Saudek’s growth
into the spheres of commercial, especially merry theatre, and productions across European
theatres: from Vienna to Hamburg). The post-war years, by contrast, marked a complete
departure from the theatrical world, which might have made Saudek’s return to the stage
before the mid-1930s all the more surprising, prompting questions about the importance of
the theatre in the diverse field of his activities and interests, and attempted answers: with
reference to the first few years, one can speak of an aesthetic-pedagogical ambition, later
of the primacy of entertainment and extrovert imagination (here too, however, a certain
social-critical reflection is possible); the play Schicksal (Fate), then, represents a return to
the original gravity: the staging of a problem, a dilemma.
Zdeněk A. Tichý and Jan Hančil prepared an interview with Miloslav Klíma, a dramaturge
and pedagogue.
In the review section, you will find two reviews written by Dalibor Tureček and Otto
Drexler, in which both authors discuss two currently released Czech books on the history
of Czech theatre. The final section contains Aleš Kolařík’s report on the 2022 symposium
“Beyond the Horizons of Theatre” dedicated in memoriam to the Czech theorist Jan Roubal.